Pod Insights The Vergecast Anyone want to buy TikTok? About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss President Biden signing the TikTok ban bill, Apple's May 7th iPad event, Tesla's flop era, and more.
Further reading:
Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to President Biden’s desk
Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law, starting the clock for ByteDance to divest it
Rabbit R1 hands-on: early tests with the $199 AI gadget
Apple announces May 7th event for new iPads
What to expect at Apple’s May ‘Let Loose’ event
The Mercedes G-Wagen, the ultimate off-road status symbol, goes electric
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have multimodal AI now
Kuo: Apple cuts Vision Pro shipments due to low demand
Tesla’s in its flop era
Tesla lays off ‘more than 10 percent’ of its workforce, loses top executives
Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal
Tesla reveals a new Model 3 Performance with more horsepower and faster acceleration
A cheaper Tesla is back on the menu
Sonos announces redesigned app that puts everything on your homescreen
Qualcomm announces Snapdragon X Plus and Elite processors
Apple might be the streaming home of soccer’s next big tournament
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 21,137 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:07 Nilay Patel? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of saying, we're going to burn your house down unless you sell it. That's the metaphor everyone's using on TikTok.
1:16 David Pierce? If you don't listen to The Vergecast, we will burn your house down.
1:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, those are your choices. You can sell your house or Krans will come to it and torch it. Yeah, I've got a lighter and everything. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. I'm good. Cranz is here. Alex Trans is here. Yeah, I'm here to hear all the scorching takes. Yeah, she's got a lighter and she's not afraid to use it. David Pierce is here.
1:36 David Pierce? Hello. We were all so close to being in the same city for like 10 minutes yesterday. And we managed to not record a Vergecast and it was very upsetting.
1:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's funny that we've gone 180. Usually at least two of us are together. We were all very close to all three of us being together. And now we're all three of us remote. But it's for good reason. David has the Rabbit R1 in hand. I can't tell you how much I want to talk about the Rabbit R1 and all the things it can or mostly cannot do. So that's very exciting. We're going to talk about that. We have to talk about the electric G-Wagon. That's another hour. The Vergecast, Apple announced new iPads. Tesla had earnings. Elon threatened once again to turn every Tesla on the road into some sort of distributed AWS situation. Very weird. We got a lightning round at the end, but we have to start. We have to start with breaking news. Joe Biden, just before we began recording today on Wednesday,
2:26 Nilay Patel? signed the bill that would force TikTok to either divest itself, to sell itself to some other company in the United States, or shut down. Those are the two choices. It passed as part of an aid package to Ukraine, Israel. There's some humanitarian aid for Gaza in that package. The House passed it as part of that aid bill. They extended the timeline and the divestiture, which was the big holdup in the Senate before. So now TikTok has nine months to figure out a sale process. And if they're making progress, whoever is the president can add three months, per the president's discretion, bringing the total to a year. So Biden basically has a year to figure this out. The clock is now ticking. The bill is signed. It's the law. And no one knows what's going to happen next.
3:10 David Pierce? Yeah, I like, there's so many strange unknowns about this. Things like, who is going to be president when we hit the nine month gap? Like, it's so obvious to me that a big part of the sticking point was to move this past the election, right? That whatever is going to happen should have to happen after election day. And it'll either be our problem after we've been reelected, if you're the Democrats, or it'll be their problem.
3:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
3:34 David Pierce? If you're the Republicans, right?
3:35 Alex Cranz? That was in Lauren's reporting, too, is that a lot of these senators signed on to approve this bill because it pushed it past the deadline, because it gave them a little bit more space to do it. So.
3:47 David Pierce? Yeah, no, I think it's such an easy maneuver at such an odd moment. And we've talked so much about the politics of this, especially among young people in the United States and all the weird ways that's going to go. And all of the stuff I've been reading recently has been very strange that like intellectually overwhelmingly, it seems like if you ask people, is TikTok sort of bad in whatever like mysterious way you want to define bad, people say yes. Like, all of the polls are basically like, yes, most people believe TikTok is a net bad. But then I think the reality of like waking up and TikTok suddenly being gone is a thing in an election season that nobody actually wants to deal with.
4:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
4:28 David Pierce? It's very strange. I also don't think that part is ever actually going to happen, but we can talk about that.
4:33 Nilay Patel? Look, I love eating handfuls of M&Ms at midnight. It's just a thing I love. I know it's bad. I know I shouldn't do that. Super do it all the time. That feels like our relationship to social media as a country right now. And maybe TikTok in particular, but in general, our relationship to social media is like, eh, making us feel bad and maybe it's measurable or maybe it's not, or maybe this guy's just a grifter trying to sell a book, whatever it is, some ambient sense of eh, I shouldn't eat M&Ms at midnight is there and then everyone just like, give them to me.
5:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
5:05 Nilay Patel? Like, let me have them. The thing that's really interesting, right? It just got signed today. It was, it felt inevitable all week that this would get signed. That was, the momentum was there. Lauren Finer, her reporting suggested the deadlines were coming ever faster, like usually with bills, there's delays and lots of change, and this was just happening. And it actually happened, I think, a little faster than we anticipated it would happen, like a day faster. Now it's done. There's no more argument whether you should ban TikTok. Like, they, they did it. They passed the bill. Joe Biden signed it. It's the law.
5:34 David Pierce? I mean, I, I do think you could ask the question of, uh, is what Joe Biden signed intended to be a ban of TikTok? Like, it's not nothing to me that in, in his statement about signing the bill and his excitement and enthusiasm for the fact that this got done after all this time, didn't mention TikTok once or any of this stuff once. It's buried like halfway down this long bill after, I forget the exact heading of the thing, but it's like miscellaneous and then TikTok. Like, this is not the point of the bill.
6:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
6:08 David Pierce? Which I think is, is a strange thing that is going to play out potentially in some interesting ways as we go through the inevitable chaos of the next nine months. This got passed in service of passing something else. And I think what everybody decided along this process is passing this other thing is so important that, sure, we'll ban TikTok. And so I think, I don't know if that changes anything about the way this actually plays out. I think that the bill is still law, like it, it did happen, but it's a strange way that we got here that makes me wonder, like, does Joe Biden actually want to ban TikTok? Or is that just a price everyone is willing to pay in order to get this important aid bill?
6:48 Alex Cranz? Oh, it was 100% a price everybody was willing to pay, right? Like, like this was a really, the, the whole bill was hard, was a hard fought battle for everybody involved. And, and this was just like, you know what?
6:59 David Pierce? We just need to get this bill out the door. If somebody wants to put this in, this is like so, so at the back of most of our list, it's fine. Which I thought was really, really interesting to go from like TikTok being like this huge center of discussion for everybody to being like essentially a footnote in a much larger bill.
7:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, they did have, the House did have the up-down vote on the standalone TikTok bill, which had a much shorter timeline. And I think a lot of people had problems with that shorter timeline. And that just sort of arrived in the Senate with nothing. So at least one part of our government had the straight up-down vote.
7:30 David Pierce? That's true.
7:30 Nilay Patel? Right. And after the House voted to pass that version of the bill, Biden said, I'm gonna sign it. I'll sign it. You get it to me and I'll sign it. Whether or not they skirted it through the Senate by attaching it to a bill that everyone wanted to get done. Yeah, I mean, like on the margins, but that's like how so many things get done.
7:48 David Pierce? Totally.
7:48 Nilay Patel? But I think you have, you had the House just the straight up-down vote and you had Biden saying, I'm gonna sign it. So the motivations, I think, are clear. Whether or not Biden wants to run around crowing that he banned TikTok, I think is very different, like politically very different. The White House, for example, announced they, that's gonna keep campaigning on TikTok.
8:08 Nilay Patel? They're just gonna, they're gonna be like, I don't know if anyone's ready for that ratio. That is gonna, in the history of ratios on the internet, every post the White House now makes, every post Joe Biden now makes on TikTok is gonna get ratioed to hell and back, and it's gonna be delightful. And that's fine.
8:24 David Pierce? I was actually thinking about that as sort of, it's like a perfect microcosm of this whole thing. And I think the, the thing that I have come around to is, in, in the months that we've been talking about this, I think at the beginning of all these conversations, I underrated how important TikTok is as an information source, particularly to young people. But now you see the stats that are like, it is a, it is a growing search engine. It's a, it's a huge source of news, particularly for like Gen Z and younger. It matters a lot. And so for the White House to A, wanna ban TikTok, but also understand that if we wanna reach people, this is the literal only way, is actually like a perfect summation of the TikTok problem. TikTok is so important that you can ban it and yet you have to use it.
9:09 David Pierce? It's so strange. But that is like, that is where we are with what TikTok means to people, right?
9:14 Nilay Patel? Somewhere in the TikTok office, there's the knob that just throttles you and like shows each you, the CEO of TikTok is just like Biden Harris HQ.
9:22 David Pierce? Yeah, their engagement is going to go way down.
9:24 Nilay Patel? From orbit. Good night, everybody. So it's done, right? The point I'm trying to make is it's done. There are only three options now. TikTok has said it's going to sue. It's going to file some sort of legal complaint to say this is not allowed. We don't know what that looks like. They showed G2 actually put up a TikTok himself saying, make no mistake. This is a ban, which is interesting. We'll come back to that. And then we're going to go to court and we're going to fight for your rights as Americans under the constitution because you can't be silenced. Also, a very interesting thing to say. And then he said, don't worry, TikTok will continue as before, like we're, we'll keep running TikTok. We're going to keep investing in TikTok. Yeah, you just hold tight. I'm going to go defend the constitution against the United States government.
10:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's, it's super funny to see the guy who made like unalive a word because you're not allowed to say dead on TikTok. The, the bastion of free speech. Like, that's a really weird stance for him to take because it's not. It's, it's PG rated social media, right? Like, like it's, it's social media for kids, which is why the kids use it. And why, part of the reason people don't want the kids using it, like, come on.
10:30 Nilay Patel? I'm never going to look at a corn emoji the same way, right? After being on TikTok. You went from very, very innocent to very weird, uh, very quickly. So there's that element. There's also the fact that it's not the user's speech that is being regulated here, right? It's TikTok, the company that distributes the speech of users. And the notion that its control of the algorithm presents some sort of national security risk. That there is some longstanding issue with having foreign powers control a significant part of our media. That's a very old policy issue. There's some issue with concentration of media ownership. So you just look at option one, we're going to file a lawsuit, we're going to win pure coin flip. We just don't know how that's going to go. We don't know what TikTok's lawsuit is going to be.
11:10 Nilay Patel? It could hinge all on free speech or it could just hinge on like a technical drafting error where the government did not. Point to the correct statutory authority from 1805 to enact, we don't like, we have to see it. So that's option one, we're going to fight a lawsuit and win. Option two is they shut down and leave. They could do that. That's the ban, right? We we've exhausted our other options and we're out of here. Um, goodbye, you ban TikTok. Weird. I I think that I think that is that that is a choice that ByteDance has to make under duress.
11:43 David Pierce? Yeah.
11:43 Nilay Patel? Right? That's the, we're going to burn your house down unless you sell it. And they could be like, God, we lit the, we lit the match. Look, see you later. We shut it down. Option two. Option three is that they sell it. And, you know, they got a year to figure it out. And option three has a bunch of weirdness in it because most of the companies that would want to buy TikTok. It feels like our own DOJ would prevent them from doing it for antitrust reasons. So that's option three. So it's not an easy road from here at all. I don't know what the creators are going to do. The creators have a year to figure out how much they want to trust TikTok. While TikTok is trying to turn itself into the home shopping network anyway. And like, it's not, and, you know, Universal Music isn't on there anymore. Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff over there that creators are going to have to react to. I I think we're in for just a whole bucket of changes.
12:27 Nilay Patel? Much in the same way that when, you know, Elon bought Twitter and started making changes over there. The social media landscape just started refracting around it. Like, things started changing all around that energy. Um, I think we're going to see the same thing with TikTok. But there's only three options. They fight and win a lawsuit, which we haven't seen and we don't know what that lawsuit will be based on, so we don't know. They leave or they sell it. That's it.
12:48 David Pierce? Okay, I just want to float a fourth option.
12:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
12:51 David Pierce? Which is they stay and the app stores pay a fine, which, in case you're wondering, I calculated it would be $850 billion. So it's an option. Just throwing it out there. Apple can do that.
13:02 Nilay Patel? That's 8.5 car projects for Apple.
13:05 David Pierce? Yeah, it's like, not even a big deal. It's fine. But I think to me, the strange thing that's gonna happen in the middle of all of that is just uncertainty, right? And I've been reading and talking to folks about this just in the last few hours. And there is this overwhelming sense from a lot of people that TikTok is sort of screwed no matter what happens, because this is like, it just got completely thrown up in the air, everything about TikTok. And there is no indication it's going to settle down quickly, right? And like, even if it gets a new owner, there will be lots of changes. If it disappears, obviously, it'll be gone. And if it fights a lawsuit, that's gonna take a long time. And so if you're a creator, if you're an
13:47 David Pierce? advertiser, if you're anyone who has any kind of investment in this platform, the simplest thing to do is going to be immediately start investing your time and energy and money somewhere else.
13:58 Nilay Patel? Yep.
13:58 David Pierce? And that is just going to bleed TikTok so fast. And to the point where even if a year from now TikTok sells to Oracle, like, what are we sure TikTok is going to still be TikTok in a year? Because I think this stuff moves fast.
14:14 Nilay Patel? Right. And then the the actual mechanism of sale is confusing, because it appears ByteDance would not sell the algorithm that underlies TikTok, right?
14:23 David Pierce? Right. Well, ByteDance has been pretty clear this whole time that it has no interest in selling. Like, if you believe ByteDance, divesting is not an option.
14:32 Alex Cranz? Well, yeah, because then we have to see if TikTok actually makes money.
14:35 Nilay Patel? Right. I mean, like, yeah, do they want a bunch of American tech companies poking around the books of TikTok? Like, they certainly do not. Do they have to say, just as a negotiating tactic, we will never sell in order to ward off a ban? They sure do. But if you're just a responsible executive, and now you're here, and you have the three choices, or a choice four, to be fair to David, which is ask Apple to pay $850 billion a year in fines for having TikTok remain in the App Store. Yeah, no, like, it feels like you got to run down two of them, right?
15:05 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, at some point, your option is either $0 or $100 billion. And you just, you sort of have no choice but to take that. But if that is the game that you're playing, you have to play that basically until the very last minute.
15:17 Nilay Patel? Look, the millionaire Chinese teens buying G wagons all over Los Angeles, it's got to come from somewhere, you know? Like the children of the CCP, they need their G wagons. That's all I'm saying. I'm just putting, I'm just putting that out there somewhere. And like money, money talks. I'm like, that's real. And I think having some dollars is better than no dollars. Whether or not it's fair that the price is depressed because the thing has to be sold. Good question. There's just not a world in which the evaluation doesn't come down to, are we going to be successful in court? What number can we get? Because that middle road of we pulled out of the United States market and now we have nothing to show for all of our investment in building the TikTok user base. It just seems it's something, that's a lawsuit too.
16:02 David Pierce? It's also just straight up bad business. Like that is just straightforwardly like a stupid capitalism decision at some point.
16:08 Nilay Patel? Notably, the Chinese government not so capitalist. Putting that out there.
16:12 David Pierce? Well, and again, like there are the question of who ultimately makes this decision on that side. Very hard to know would tell you a lot about how this will turn out, right? Like if, if Shu Chu, the CEO of TikTok is the person who ultimately makes the decision. That will be very different than if TikTok is connected to ByteDance is connected to the Chinese Communist Party, which ultimately means the Chinese Communist Party makes that decision. That would go very differently. Like there's so many things we don't know still.
16:41 Alex Cranz? It's an exciting time, honestly. Like I love when a social media platform changes hands or has this big moment. Cause then you see, see things like Adam Mosseri today. Was it on Instagram, Neela? I think you, you, you clocked the video of him just explaining to creators how to get engagement. Yeah. On the platform. And it's like, that probably wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a TikTok.
17:01 Nilay Patel? Adam Mosseri being like, so okay, you're at work. I'm going to set some goals for you and we're going to check in in six months to see how they're going and you know, see how it's going. And it's like, dude, why does this all feel like work? Yeah. Like I actually think that's like the bigger story here is like, this feels like a work for an awful lot of people across all of these platforms.
17:17 David Pierce? Yeah.
17:18 Nilay Patel? And like, maybe some people are going to be like, I don't want to work for TikTok anymore because it came to nothing. And that will just create energy somewhere else. We'll see.
17:25 David Pierce? One of the funniest memes to me on Instagram is all the people who are like, oh, I had a call with Meta and we talked about, you know, strategies for how to succeed. And it like, it has become a meme of people making jokes about it, but it started as a real thing. And it's like, it's a big win to have a business call with Meta executives about your Instagram presence.
17:43 Alex Cranz? Wait, did social media become the new Mary Kay?
17:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Oh, it's, it's been there for a long time. And you've seen the people sell the hydro water bottles?
17:53 Nilay Patel? The bottles just have a blue LED in the bottom and they're like, this adds hydrogen to your water.
17:57 Alex Cranz? That's a lie.
17:58 Nilay Patel? It's very bad.
18:01 Nilay Patel? And if you don't understand why it's bad, I'm just telling you that water is made of hydrogen. Yeah, it's already in there. There's two of them for every oxygen, famously. You get, you get two of them. Double your hydrogens. And it's like, what are you doing? Like, how is this happening on this platform? And they're all selling them in TikTok shop. And I just think that platform, the revenue pressure on all the social platforms is so high. But all these companies need to make money, they show profitability, they're doing layoffs and they're just turning the screws. I'm like, can we, how do we make money? And they just landed on the home shopping network. I think it was headed towards a cliff anyway. Like, there was a bubble in video creator economy. Taylor Lawrence has actually talked about it. And you can just see, like, to me, the hydro water bottle is like, oh, that bubble's getting pretty big.
18:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
18:47 Nilay Patel? Like, it's, it's not good. Alright, so here's the exercise I want to do.
18:52 Nilay Patel? Three options, right? Lawsuit succeeds. ByteDance burns it down, or they get sold. TikTok is a prize, right? It is the thing that no one can get. It is a scaled social network with an active user base of young people. That's what everybody wants. It's really hard to get the way that TikTok got it, right? They acquired Musically and then ByteDance started spending billions upon billions of dollars on Facebook and Instagram ads to convert people into downloading the app. You can't really do that. You can't even run that playbook anymore because of Apple's app tracking transparency. Like, they made the ad changes and so the market for app install ads is basically gone. You have to pay Apple for them and the apps to have. A different conversation, but the point is you can't just run the playbook ByteDance did. And they ran that playbook to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars. Right.
19:37 Nilay Patel? So here's this thing that was really hard to do, that the conditions under which ByteDance did it have dramatically changed. And it was very expensive, even when they could do it. It's what everybody wants. It will be expensive, right? This isn't. This isn't like Twitter fire sale. And even that was expensive, as we've all discovered, like that was overpriced. This is the thing, like it is a scaled video advertising platform with a bunch of young people on it that love it, that defines the culture all the time. So who can afford it? I just looked up the list of the largest American companies by market cap. All of the ones that are measured in trillions are tech companies. So I figured we could just go down that list. And then we can go to the companies that are measured in billions, which are much more amusing to think about as owners of ByteDance.
20:19 David Pierce? This is very fun.
20:20 Nilay Patel? I think we should, we should start with the tech companies because they seem like the most likely group to at least have some interest.
20:26 David Pierce? Clarifying question. How much should we think TikTok is worth? I have an idea in mind, but I'm curious if, if there is a like assumed number that I have not heard for what TikTok is valued at. Do we know?
20:40 Nilay Patel? Uh, so the number that I have just picked out of the blue is a hundred billion dollars. Because that is more than double what Twitter was worth.
20:47 David Pierce? Okay.
20:47 Nilay Patel? It's a huge, it's a huge number. Most companies can't just do that, right?
20:50 David Pierce? I would have actually gone a little higher, like the, there was the, the estimate recently that YouTube is worth $400 billion on its own. So I was going to say like 200, let's go.
20:59 Nilay Patel? Once you're up here, it's just like whatever number you want. Another hundred bill?
21:02 David Pierce? I'm good with a hundred.
21:03 Alex Cranz? Oh, no, no. TikTok doesn't have like the numbers of YouTube though, right? Like I'm.
21:07 David Pierce? Or the money or the, yeah, no, you're right. I'm good with a hundred billion. This, this works.
21:12 Nilay Patel? By the way, I'm picking that number just because it is this, it's a small, hard number.
21:16 David Pierce? Yeah.
21:17 Nilay Patel? Right? Forty four billion for Twitter was like overpriced, but not even then, a lot of companies were just like, do it.
21:23 David Pierce? I don't think there's any world in which TikTok is in a, in a regular, pure market sense worth less than a hundred billion. So I feel, I feel pretty good about this.
21:32 Nilay Patel? And I'll, I'll just for some comparison, as of December 2023, Apple had $73 billion in cash on hand, which is an insane amount of cash. Like Apple is one of those cash rich companies out there. And that's how much, so I picked a hundred because it's, it would be hard even for an Apple to pull.
21:47 David Pierce? Yeah.
21:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Anyway, here's the list. The Apple and Microsoft jockeying back and forth for. Biggest market cap. So we'll start with Microsoft today. Microsoft actually feels like Microsoft should be in the running for TikTok. They have been in the running before. When Trump tried to ban TikTok, Satya Nadella got pulled into those conversations. He has repeatedly described it as some of the weirdest business dealings he's ever been a part of. Then it just went away. And we got Project Texas where Oracle took over the data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which came to nothing, appears to have been mostly a front.
22:23 David Pierce? Convinced no one of anything.
22:24 Nilay Patel? No, no one cares about Project Texas.
22:26 David Pierce? And Microsoft has been desperate for like a true consumer play for a long time. I mean, it wasn't at Microsoft that sniffed around Discord in a pretty big way. Like it wants something like this very badly.
22:39 Alex Cranz? I disagree. This is, this is like a big old hot potato. Microsoft wants no part of like the big power of Microsoft nowadays is that we don't talk about Microsoft that often. And, and that would change immediately with TikTok.
22:53 Nilay Patel? A good question for all this is, does your CEO want to get hauled in front of Congress to talk about content moderation? Right. And Microsoft, no, the answer appears to be no. That said, there is a lot of scrutiny around Microsoft's deal with OpenAI. Like a lot of antitrust scrutiny. And this is going to come up. The idea of antitrust scrutiny is going to come up as we go through this list. And there's, I think Microsoft could run a play where they say, look, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a partnership with like Snap, which can definitely, Snap is not on the list of biggest American companies by any, by any means, like. Not even in top 100. Like, no, it's not even sniffing this. But you can say, Microsoft, you can see Microsoft say, okay, we're going to do this weird kind of partnership with Snap.
23:33 Nilay Patel? Where they will fund them buying TikTok, will like be their backend provider, will run AI and Azure for recommendations. And it'll be the same kind of structure as OpenAI. And if that's fine over here, because it solves a great problem, I bet it's fine over here with OpenAI.
23:45 Alex Cranz? Lena Kahn will drop kick that deal right out the door.
23:51 Nilay Patel? I mean, but this is the, this is the game, right? All these companies are, it's an opera, this is a problem that needs to get solved. Someone has to buy this thing. And if Lena Kahn is like, I'm not going to let anyone buy it, then it is a ban. And so you have to at least run the process and you have to create some leverage somewhere.
24:06 David Pierce? I think Microsoft has like three meetings, but ultimately walks away.
24:10 Nilay Patel? Again, they came close before. Also, Microsoft doesn't have a dead on antitrust problem because it doesn't run any social networks. It's from Xbox Live. And so it, you know, they could just buy it. I don't know if they'd want to, but I think using it as leverage to turn down the heat on OpenAI might be interesting. That's Microsoft. Apple, one or two of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft, Apple, always going back and forth, Apple. No way is my answer to this question. Zero percent that Tim Cook wants to sit in front of Congress and talk about content moderation, ever.
24:39 David Pierce? The funniest possible outcome of this whole thing is that Apple buys TikTok and makes it a feature of Apple TV Plus. That is the, that is the single best thing that could possibly happen, that this is, this is their content play for Apple TV Plus.
24:53 Alex Cranz? Oh, it would be, it would be Apple Music.
24:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Apple Music, right. Apple owns a music service. TikTok is huge in music. They have great relationships with all the labels because they're the big hedge against Spotify. Apple importantly has an incredible relationship with the Chinese government that is extremely well managed by Tim Cook. So they're, they're a known partner that would find a way to blah, blah, blah, interoperate, you know, with, by dance globally. You, you could see the arguments. I'm just saying, I don't think Tim Cook wants to sit in front of Congress and talk about content moderation.
25:23 Alex Cranz? I think, Neelai, they're gonna use that exact quote you just said when they pull Tim Cook in front of Congress for buying TikTok.
25:30 David Pierce? You have a good relationship with the Chinese government is precisely the reason not to buy TikTok if you're Tim Cook.
25:38 Nilay Patel? All right, moving on. I, I, I think we can all, it would be the shock of all shocks if Apple buys TikTok. Nvidia, third biggest market cap in the country right now. It feels a bit afield.
25:49 Alex Cranz? No, no. Jensen's like, he's a smart dude, right? Like, he, he started that company from the ground up. He's still running it now. He made his big bet on AI. He'd like, they think very measured over there. Like, everything they do has a purpose and a point, even when it's a screw up. So I'd be like, very surprised.
26:10 David Pierce? Okay, allow me to make the counter case.
26:12 Alex Cranz? I love it.
26:13 David Pierce? I'm Jensen Huang. I have somewhat intentionally, somewhat accidentally stumbled into just an unbelievable gold mine that is the AI revolution. This will not last forever. Other people are going to figure out how to make GPUs as good as mine, and I'm not going to be able to sell H100s for however much money I want to whoever I want forever. I need another move. That other move is TikTok.
26:39 Nilay Patel? I want, I want that. Someone is writing that memo to Nvidia right now. And then at the end of it, it's like, question mark, question mark, question mark, profit, you know? Like, this is the move that's as big as H100. It's like, I don't know about that.
26:54 David Pierce? No, the, the other, the other reason is there, there is a real version of this that is TikTok as training data.
27:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:02 David Pierce? Uh, which I think is, is not worth a hundred billion dollars, but is also not worth nothing. And I think one reason a lot of these companies will take a good, hard look at TikTok is not because they want to operate a social network forever, but because operating a social network gets them basically an infinite supply of good training data for AI systems.
27:21 Alex Cranz? For now, right?
27:23 David Pierce? That's just what it is. I mean, this is what Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about with Facebook. Like they're, they're touting the fact that they have this vast supply of stuff.
27:30 Nilay Patel? All right. So Jensen swoops in and he's like, look, I'm already in the middle of geopolitical hot zones.
27:36 David Pierce? Yeah.
27:36 Nilay Patel? Uh, cause I'm, you know, I'm building ships with TSMC in Taiwan and the whole universe is organized around H1, H100 production in Taiwan. What if I add a little TikTok to the mix? I could do it. All right. That's, that's N V D. I, I'm putting that sub 50%.
27:51 David Pierce? Way sub 50.
27:52 Nilay Patel? But I'm 10. Do it, Jensen. Alphabet, or as the people know it, Google.
28:00 Alex Cranz? I mean, I think that no one wants them to buy it.
28:04 Nilay Patel? If you want to ban TikTok, you let Google buy it and just slowly kill it until they shut it down.
28:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like, that, like, that's what'll happen. That, that is effectively a ban. So, no.
28:15 Nilay Patel? Do you think they're having a conversation?
28:17 Alex Cranz? I think Google's totally having that conversation though. Like they, they love a social media platform that they kill a few years later. This is just like.
28:24 Nilay Patel? But so to David's point, this is a rich source of training data for.
28:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I think that's why they're, they're actually talking about it.
28:30 Nilay Patel? A long time ago, when I asked Sundar about the web and what SEO is done to the web and where you would start a new thing, if you were a new creator, he said, well, we have, we have YouTube. Right. So they know that all the sort of organic content that is made by human beings. Is happening on video platforms. This is a rich source of that. They're already searching TikTok. You can search for TikToks on Google.
28:48 David Pierce? Yeah, don't forget, Google has been saying loudly for two years now that one of the biggest threats to Google search is TikTok.
28:53 Nilay Patel? Yep.
28:55 Alex Cranz? Which is again, why they're not gonna.
28:58 Nilay Patel? This is the real Lena Kahn hands on hips one, right?
29:00 David Pierce? Yeah. Alphabet would do this. I, I believe absolutely yes, Alphabet would do this. It would be sued to death. Once Lena Kahn is like already standing outside of the Google Plex and Mountain View with a lawsuit and just ready to like huck it into Sundar Pichai's office the minute this happens. I like, if I'm, if I'm Sundar Pichai, I would do this in one second. But there's absolutely no chance that they will.
29:27 Nilay Patel? All right. So that's Google. And the next one is really interesting. Amazon. Uh, I think Amazon looks at TikTok slowly turning into the home shopping network. And moving an awful lot of records. Uh, and it's like this, we, this is what we want. This is the future of shopping.
29:43 David Pierce? Yeah.
29:44 Alex Cranz? Yep.
29:44 David Pierce? Amazon has been gently trying to do this on Amazon properties for a while. They've had creator, brand things that they've done. They've brought people in. They've done video stuff. None of it has really worked. But yeah, I, I think, I think Amazon of these is the one that makes the most sense and also probably the one that is most likely to be plausible.
30:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't think they don't run a social platform now in any way, shape or form. So the antitrust issues don't seem so bad. That said, you know, the Europeans just blocked Amazon from buying iRobot because they were worried about concentration in the robotic vacuum market. And Andy Jassy looked furious when he was talking about that on CNBC. Just so mad.
30:24 David Pierce? Yeah.
30:25 Nilay Patel? He's like, we're well beyond the law now. Like, are we?
30:28 Alex Cranz? It sounds like you're right by the law.
30:30 Nilay Patel? But they don't, but they don't have a social platform. And TikTok really is a big advertising play and Amazon is actually one of the biggest advertisers out there. I could see it. I think this would probably turn TikTok into something worse.
30:41 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
30:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah, this is like Google where you don't, if you're a TikTok user, you don't want this purchase.
30:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Like where, can you imagine if you just combine Amazon, Alphabet soup brands with TikTok shops, just general aesthetic?
30:55 Alex Cranz? Amazon basics, just nonstop in your feed.
30:58 Nilay Patel? I would 100% calling, start calling that group of TikTok creators, Amazon basics.
31:05 Nilay Patel? You know who I'm talking to.
31:06 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
31:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like the Amazon basics, it would be
31:08 Alex Cranz? They're there.
31:09 Nilay Patel? Bad for America. Uh, okay, that's Amazon. That feels very likely of this list so far. Microsoft and Amazon feel like the the most likely to to at least try. Uh, then there's Meta, which feels like a immediate hard no.
31:23 David Pierce? Yeah.
31:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
31:23 Nilay Patel? And I think the TikTok user base would revolt and leave if they tried.
31:26 David Pierce? Meta would do it. It wouldn't be allowed to do it.
31:29 Nilay Patel? Oh, surely what Microsoft was a killer.
31:31 David Pierce? Yeah.
31:32 Nilay Patel? He'd be like $100 billion. Like, how many people do I have to kill? I'll just, it's done. It's been done.
31:37 David Pierce? And then at that point, I think Meta would own the five most popular apps in existence.
31:42 Nilay Patel? And also, the regulators have a really good argument for Meta right now. She's, hey, you just made threads from scratch. And it's doing great by some, you know, fake accounting. Uh, it's bigger than Twitter. And I always say fake because Twitter's numbers are fake. And then it's like censor tower numbers, which are weird, like.
31:56 Alex Cranz? No one's numbers are real.
31:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you you just mash together a bunch of very truthy feeling numbers, and like threads is bigger than Twitter. Fine. Uh, but the argument would be, well, you can do it on your own. You don't need you don't need this. Uh, so we'll see. So that's, okay, that's all the companies with valuations in the Ts. Uh, notably, they are all tech companies. Then you slide down one notch. You go from six to seven. The valuations are now in the Bs and the billions. Uh, and I would just say these are much funnier companies to consider. Berkshire Hathaway.
32:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah. That's the most likely, honestly.
32:26 Nilay Patel? Warren Buffett.
32:28 Alex Cranz? Warren Buffett's like social media. Let's go.
32:29 David Pierce? Like Warren Buffett buying TikTok so that he could become like the ultimate TikToker in the way that Elon Musk bought Twitter. So he could just be the tweeter, like, perfect.
32:38 Nilay Patel? When I think of Warren Buffett, I think of the phrase burnout, not fade away and buying TikTok. Really, just light a fire, baby. Just get out there. You got Geico.
32:48 David Pierce? Driving in his old car to McDonald's every morning, just vlogging on Tik. Are you kidding me? Come on.
32:55 Nilay Patel? It would be great. I could see it. I don't know how it fits in the in the portfolio. Uh, it would be good. Uh, Eli Lilly?
33:03 Nilay Patel? That feels like a no. Visa?
33:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
33:06 Nilay Patel? JP Morgan Chase. Why not have a bank own TikTok?
33:11 David Pierce? What if TikTok was just payments processing?
33:15 Nilay Patel? At the end of the day, Tesla is here at number 12 on market cap list, although that valuation fluctuating wildly with every breath Elon takes. That feels like an obvious no, although the man does love a social network, so.
33:27 David Pierce? I mean, yeah, is Elon Musk himself a totally bonkers possibility here?
33:33 Nilay Patel? I will say Elon, you know, he's doing whatever he's doing on Twitter and he's got Linda out there being like Twitter's a video first platform. And then Elon is the most text forward person in the entire world. That's it. I don't think so.
33:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah, he's on TikTok.
33:44 Nilay Patel? This one's interesting. Walmart, which actually tried to enter the TikTok sweepstakes long ago. On the list, a huge American company would be fascinating, I think, for the same reasons as Amazon. Right? Can we, can we build a new kind of shopping distribution? I don't know. It doesn't, it does not seem likely. It does not seem like that's what.
34:04 Alex Cranz? They have so many ambitions and a lot of money, but like Amazon, I don't want it.
34:09 Nilay Patel? All right, I'm just going to read the, the, the next five and as an exercise for the reader, just like silently consider them and send us an email over which ones. You think should buy TikTok of this list. ExxonMobil.
34:23 David Pierce? Yes.
34:23 Nilay Patel? Mastercard, Procter and Gamble, Home Depot, Costco, Bank of America.
34:30 David Pierce? Okay, Costco is something.
34:32 Alex Cranz? Costco, there we go.
34:33 David Pierce? I just want to pause on Costco for one second. You know what is a brand that everybody loves?
34:39 Nilay Patel? People love Costco.
34:40 Alex Cranz? But if they have to start paying influencers a living wage, like they do with their, their regular staff, no. That's, that's too much money.
34:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Costco is like a well, you know, it's a well run company in that way. Um, then there's the two tech companies I skipped over here. Oracle, which is already in the mix. You could see it, right? They're already in the mix for a reason. Uh, and then Salesforce, which I'm, I think we should end with Salesforce. Because that is the darkest outcome for TikTok.
35:07 David Pierce? So Salesforce buys TikTok and tries to turn it into what LinkedIn became for Microsoft.
35:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:14 David Pierce? Basically.
35:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:15 David Pierce? Like Salesforce just goes all in on like business TikTok.
35:19 Nilay Patel? Why not? This is the future of American small business is happening on TikTok. Small business TikTok is still my favorite thing. Their pressure washer guy is out there today being like, it's spring, baby. Light it up. And then they're immediately making TikTok shop content where they're trying to convince me to buy extremely obviously cheap surface cleaner where like they plug it in and you see the whole thing dent in as they plug in the water. I'm like, what are we doing here? Anyway, sorry. I have a lot of feelings about TikTok right now.
35:47 David Pierce? You might watch too many ads on TikTok. I just.
35:49 Nilay Patel? The whole thing is ads.
35:51 David Pierce? You know that, right? Like you just scroll past them.
35:52 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying.
35:53 David Pierce? I just scroll until I get bloopers from the office. So I don't even know what you're talking about.
35:56 Nilay Patel? Uh, have you started seeing they're doing like the shimmer effect across it to prevent the the content ID? It's very good.
36:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:03 Nilay Patel? TikTok, honestly, Disney should buy TikTok because TikTok is the most impressive laboratory of copyright infringement that exists in the world today and maybe in world history.
36:13 David Pierce? So I was actually going to bring up Disney as a, as a wild card here. I don't think Disney can afford to do this. But I think like Disney kicked the tires on Twitter a bunch of years ago. Disney is interested in a new media startup in a really big way. I think TikTok is probably too big to be that thing for Disney, but I, I, if I'm Bob Iger, like I bet, I bet there is a memo in that boardroom.
36:36 Alex Cranz? Is Disney still interested? Cause I think when they kicked the tires on Twitter, that was also around the same time they launched Fusion, which was like their, their digital media play.
36:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah. That was the wasting money of in Disney era.
36:49 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I, I think they're beyond this point now.
36:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
36:52 David Pierce? I, I don't think so. I think Disney is in the business of getting young people to watch its stuff and that the answer to that is TikTok.
37:01 Nilay Patel? I want everyone to pull over in a car and just imagine with a TikTok themed part of Walt Disney World.
37:06 David Pierce? Oh my God.
37:07 Nilay Patel? Let's close that loop.
37:09 David Pierce? Every ride is 60 seconds long.
37:13 David Pierce? And you just leap.
37:13 Nilay Patel? It's somewhat unsatisfying unless you do it a hundred times in a row. Um, I don't think Bob Iger wants to talk about content moderation in front of Congress. I think that destroys Disney's brand, right? To be anywhere close to, there is evidence that teenage girls are feeling depressed because of our product. Not, not Disney's own.
37:31 Nilay Patel? But it's, it's interesting to consider because it is where, you know, like Disney missed out on Coco Melon, which was a YouTube phenomenon and is now a Netflix phenomenon. They, they don't have a pipeline for that stuff and TikTok might be that pipeline. I just, I don't think they have the money and I don't think they have the, the mental stamina based on all the other things that are going Disney. All right, that's the list. There's other stuff you could talk about AMD and Pepsi and Netflix, but I feel like that's the list. And you got to end with Salesforce. Cause I just want everyone to consider the darkest timeline.
38:00 Nilay Patel? We'll see what happens. You know, a bunch of Verge reporters are out in the world pounding the pavement to see who wants to buy things. What Alex, he told me yesterday when I, when I was like, hey, let's go through your list. He's like, it's crickets because they're all afraid of Lena Khan. And I think that is, that was how they were talking before Biden signed the bill. And I think that will change in the weeks to come. But there's going to be a lawsuit. We'll see how it all goes. Kind of a wild time though. Like I, if you've been paying attention to the Verge cast, you know that we, we generally think like all of social media and the internet is being like table flipped upheaval and like things are shaken out in different ways. This is one pretty big table flip.
38:36 David Pierce? Yeah. I think it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how this radiates outward too. Because like, there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of days about what this is going to mean for Instagram and for YouTube shorts and for Snap. And there's this sense of a handful of companies in the US that really stand to benefit from the downfall of TikTok. And I think where people go, if they go, and how those platforms start to change is going to yet again upend the rest of everything. Like if, if TikTok suddenly floods into YouTube, it will change YouTube completely.
39:10 Alex Cranz? Oh, there's going to be a land grab a hundred percent. Between like the QVC nature of TikTok and this, all those like edge case people, the people who aren't really, really into it are going to be like, yeah, I'll just, I'll go somewhere else because at least I'm, it's, I'm not getting sold to.
39:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And this is a, you recall what happened with Vine, right? The exodus of Vine to YouTube really changed the nature of YouTube. So you can just feel it coming. By the way, I forgot, I was just scrolling. I forgot the darkest timeline option, which I'm just going to say, and then we're going to cut to a break. Verizon buys TikTok.
39:41 Nilay Patel? That's it. We'll be right back. We're gonna talk about the RAVR1.
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41:16 Nilay Patel? We're back. I just want to say if AT&T bought TikTok, imagine what Zack Snyder would get up to.
41:22 David Pierce? Well, it would immediately be spun off into some other... David Zaslove would own it six months later, so it would be fine.
41:28 Nilay Patel? Four-three grayscale TikToks for everyone. Extremely dark.
41:32 David Pierce? We've been talking a lot about terrible movies on this podcast recently. Should we talk about Rebel Moon?
41:36 Nilay Patel? I refuse. That one's like very bad. Like, it's so obviously bad.
41:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I haven't even looked at it.
41:43 Nilay Patel? I saw, I don't think this is a spoiler, I saw a screenshot of one of the final scenes where the ship is revealed to be a woman who is hogtied.
41:49 Alex Cranz? Oh, good stuff.
41:51 Nilay Patel? Doesn't seem like my bag.
41:53 David Pierce? Also, that's almost certainly a spoiler, and I just don't care. So I'm sorry to everyone who...
41:57 Alex Cranz? No, I mean, it does make me kind of want to watch it, but just so I can be mad while watching it.
42:01 Nilay Patel? That's how I felt about it.
42:04 Nilay Patel? To be clear.
42:06 Alex Cranz? Just range watch.
42:07 Nilay Patel? Enough, enough of the Zach Steiner talk.
42:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
42:10 Nilay Patel? Look, the man took his bag from AT&T and he made a square movie in grayscale where Superman is super weird.
42:17 David Pierce? And you bring it up like three out of every four podcasts.
42:19 Nilay Patel? You know, the thing, the policy thing that we're not about, we don't have time to talk about is soon net neutrality will become the law of land again and everyone's going to talk about how net neutrality didn't mean anything, blah, blah, and I'm just going to be like, Justice League happened to you because you repealed net neutrality. It's a real, that was a real outcome of repealing net neutrality. You don't believe me, but it's 100% true. All right, I want to talk about a thing that I've been most excited to talk about all week.
42:45 Nilay Patel? David, you went to a party at the TWA Hotel at JFK in New York, which is a wild place to have a gadget launch. You saw Rabbit happen. There was a demo on stage, which we should talk about because I have a lot of feelings about that demo. And now you are holding a Rabbit R1. You have a review unit.
43:02 Alex Cranz? Show it.
43:02 David Pierce? I have it right here.
43:03 Alex Cranz? It's just so orange.
43:04 David Pierce? It's mine. I bought this with my own money.
43:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Oh, it's yours.
43:07 David Pierce? I own this. It's not, they didn't do review units. This was, so what I went to was the, the pickup party for the first, I think it was 300 R1s that came out. So they, they invited a bunch of media, but we had to buy our own in order to get into the event, which is fine.
43:25 Nilay Patel? Very good.
43:25 David Pierce? I should say to people who don't know how this process normally works, often for reviews, people will ship us something and we'll test it and review it and then we ship it back. That's usually how it works because if I had to buy every single thing that I wrote about, I would be homeless. So that's usually how it works. But in this case, we had to buy the thing. So now I, I own this thing. Luckily it was only $200. But so we get to the TWA Hotel, which is amazing. I had never been. It's like, it's a very old terminal at JFK that has since been converted into this very swanky, kind of old fashioned hotel. It's awesome. Highly recommend. I had never been there before. I will probably never go again, but it was super cool.
44:00 Alex Cranz? You should only go. If you're having to fly in or out of JFK.
44:05 David Pierce? Yeah. Oh God, it took me two trains and an Uber to get there. Like, I don't recommend this plan otherwise. But yeah, so it was it was me and 300 or so other people along with a bunch of rapid employees in this space. They had done lots of, you know, work to overhaul it. It had a big stage in the middle. They had a 360 photo booth and a speakeasy upstairs. There was a bar with signature drinks. They were doing all kinds of merchy stuff. It was very much like an old school tech party. Like, I haven't been to one of those since before the pandemic, where it's just like a company with too much money. That's just like, what if we just blew a bunch of it on this large event space?
44:43 David Pierce? And then Jesse Liu, the founder and CEO, got up and spent like an hour basically just doing demos. And he's been doing this for the last couple of months, kind of with increasing frequency, showing off how this thing works and what it can do and all this stuff. And he just sort of stood on stage and did a bunch of demos that were ostensibly live. And I have many questions about all of them. And then gave them out to that first group of, you know, 300 people. And so it was everybody there had like literally bought a thing to be there. So the room was very excited and there were a lot of people who had been in the Discord for months, sort of reading about the humane reviews and figuring out what was going on. And trying to get details on what this thing would do and how it would work.
45:28 David Pierce? And lots of people, it was very funny, like being in line for a bar while people are behind me debating how the large language model works. And there was a guy who was like, yeah, every time you ask a question, you're eating into that $199 price. And I was just like, these are my people. It was great. I had I had a delightful time, except that it was at 7:00 PM on a Tuesday night. And I'm very old and I can't hang like that anymore.
45:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So you've got the thing now.
45:52 David Pierce? I have the thing. It's right here.
45:55 Nilay Patel? You've only had it for days. I don't think this is a review, but I was watching the demo that he did on stage. And two things struck me with that demo. One, there was a little disclaimer on the stream and he showed himself turning off the wifi. The entire demo was done over 4G LTE, not 5G, the one that is famously claimed to have very low latency. Good old 4G LTE, which is an interesting choice, but that's 199 bucks. And then he kept pointing out how fast everything was. At one point, he took a picture and, you know, the thing did the thing where the AI told you it was in the picture. And I was like, I don't. I don't think that uploaded over 4G LTE, like literally just the basics of it didn't seem like it was making sense.
46:35 David Pierce? So two things on that. One, none of it was fast. Like, go back and watch it again. He did a very good job of sort of talking through his demos so that while it was waiting for stuff to happen, it would work. And there were, there were a few times where he would do something and it would pretty instantly do it. But what it does very well is it, it signposts as it's doing stuff. So like you'll ask it a question and it'll respond and say, let me go get that for you. And then it'll say, I'm going to get that for you. And then it gets it for you. And what you've, what it doesn't do is just sort of leave you hanging in awkward silence for several seconds, which feels like an eternity. But it does take a while to do a lot of things. And with the photo, having now tested this a bunch, what it does when you like hold up the
47:17 David Pierce? thing and say, you know, look at this and tell me what you see, uh, which is like the, the sort of computer vision thing that a lot of these gadgets do. It's not taking a good picture. It takes an awful picture. And I can show you the awful pictures I've been taking. But it literally, it just uploads just the tiniest little bit of data in order to be able to answer the question. Is there a crowd full of people or like a begonia in front of you? Right? Like that is the fidelity that it needs. And that is all of the fidelity that it gets. So I actually think that particular one seems plausible to me.
47:50 Nilay Patel? I guess I do need to watch it again because I was just struck by the speed at which things appeared to be happening over a 4G connection, not even a 5G connection, over a 4G connection. Like I'm not even putting this on rabbit. I'm just like, I've used LTE connections before.
48:07 Nilay Patel? They're not fast, especially now, right? Whenever all the bandwidth is being prioritized to the 5G connections, all the spectrum is being prioritized over there. That was one. And then there's the other thing that struck me was how much stuff it can't do. That we were shown it doing at the first launch event in CS, where that stuff is just nowhere close.
48:23 David Pierce? Like everything? It's weird. And even after being at that launch event where he got up on stage, Jesse, and said out loud, I am going to demo all of the things that it can do from day one. And I have been testing those things and it can't do some of them. So the one of the big things that Rabbit has been talking about is this thing called the large action model, right? And the idea is that it can actually like learn how to use apps on your behalf. That's like, that's its whole pitch. It's not just like a thing for ChatGPT. It's a thing where you can say, go do Spotify for me, right? Or like, go interact with Photoshop for me. That's literally one of the things they've talked about. Like, you can teach it how to use Photoshop for you. That is not coming soon.
49:04 David Pierce? It's not, it's, it's like a thing that somebody had the idea to do. It's like when we talk about car renders, right? It's like, it's at the render stage, as far as I can tell. And then there's a bunch of stuff that seems very basic. Like, I gave Humane a lot of crap for not supporting things like alarms and reminders and these very basic things. And you know what the Rabbit R1 doesn't support is alarms and reminders. And ironically, like Humane, like the deja vu of all of this is bananas for me. Like, like Humane, Jesse stood on stage and put up a big slide with, here's all the cool stuff we're shipping in summer of 2024. And it's things like alarm, calendar, contacts, GPS, memory recall,
49:47 David Pierce? travel planning, Yelp. Like, basic things. These are, these are, these are things that you should have from the beginning. And there's just not really a good reason not to have it. So right now, again, I've been testing this thing for a grand total of like, 16 hours, some of which I was asleep, right? Like, none of this is final yet, but like, a lot of things about this device do not work very well.
50:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:12 Alex Cranz? And it only has four apps, right?
50:14 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah. So I will say, the biggest, most complicated question about the Rabbit is how this large action model works, and thus what you're giving it access to. So when you log into the website, which is called Rabbit Hole, which I enjoy very much, the branding on this thing is on point. They've done a very good job. When you're playing music, there's a little rabbit guy with headphones on, like, it's great. Excellent branding exercise, well done. But you log into Rabbit Hole, and you go to, there's a tab called Connections, and it like lists all the apps you can connect to. And right now, it's, it's four. Like you said, it's Spotify, DoorDash, Uber, and Mid Journey. Which is a strange four, but whatever.
50:55 David Pierce? And then, so you, you click on the connect button and what it does is open up a virtual machine on Rabbit's servers through which you just log into the Spotify web interface or the DoorDash web interface. So like I click on the DoorDash button and literally it opens the DoorDash website, just the homepage of DoorDash.com on the thing. And then I had to go click sign in. I had to enter in my credentials and then I clicked continue. Like I'm signing into DoorDash normally and then it closes that window because now it has stored my credentials. And what Rabbit says is it doesn't store your credentials. It just stores like an authentication token so that you stay logged in. And to that I say, like, have you ever tried to stay logged into a service on the internet? Like, it's not possible. You can't,
51:40 David Pierce? the keep me logged in button doesn't work. So there is something else going on here. And there are a lot of people who are like, oh, what you're doing is you're just exposing all of your login credentials to a virtual machine that's just sitting on Rabbit's computer. Like, you're just uploading your life to Rabbit's servers. That's stupid.
51:55 Nilay Patel? Well, there's also one step beyond that, which is you have now logged into DoorDash on Rabbit's servers and it's logged in. So it doesn't matter if you have the credential.
52:05 David Pierce? Well, right.
52:05 Nilay Patel? You have perfect logged in access to DoorDash.
52:08 David Pierce? Yes. And I think for me, I, uh, like, I'm, I'm logging into all of these things because I have to test this thing. But like, even logging into Spotify felt strange. Like, this is like, this is actually kind of a lot of access to information about me that you just have now. And that's odd. Uh, but anyway, the interface for that sucks. The system isn't very good. I have not yet successfully used DoorDash. Every single time I try to do it, I like, I, you know, you press the button on the side and you say, order me some food. And every single time it says, DoorDash may take a while to load on Rabbit OS, which is very funny. And then it just immediately fails every single time.
52:44 Nilay Patel? So what's happening in the background there, from what I gather, what the heart of the large action model is it's gonna click around on the DoorDash website for you?
52:56 David Pierce? I believe that's correct. Yeah, I think the the long term plan here is to have more. Let's say robust integrations that they can actually like there's way to you do that with like structured data that you can get to some of that stuff, but.
53:09 Nilay Patel? But that's the old way, right? Like DoorDash has an API and we've built a weird interface for DoorDash on our little orange square. You could, you don't need a bunch of AI for that.
53:17 David Pierce? No, you don't. Uh, but it works.
53:21 Nilay Patel? Right. So this is like you're logged into DoorDash and we're going to show you pictures of the, we're going to understand the DoorDash interface for you. And then we're going to let, you're going to say, buy me this food and we're just going to use the DoorDash website on your behalf. Like that's the, that, that is my understanding of what the large action model should do.
53:38 David Pierce? Yeah, no, that, that's, that's exactly right. And part of the process that they make, that they're in theory, one day, someday when this launches. Going to make you go through is training the apps that you use. Like this is where you click to do X and this is where you click to do Y. And you scroll down to get to the other thing. And that is, that is how you teach these models how to do this stuff. And the reason they've worked with these four apps now is because their people have done that training with these four apps. So like.
54:04 Nilay Patel? Do they have deals with the four apps? Do they have deals with Spotify and Uber and DoorDash? You know, Uber and DoorDash are competitors. Like Uber Eats exists.
54:11 David Pierce? Yeah, I, I don't, I don't know, but I sure doubt it.
54:15 Alex Cranz? I have a more basic question. Okay. I know you've only spent, what, 16 hours with it? But in that time, have you had an experience with it where you're like, oh, wow. I would willingly train this model when I get more access to it, to have these kind of experience with another app.
54:34 David Pierce? Um, the Spotify integration is the one to me that I'm like, this is the thing I really want to work.
54:40 Alex Cranz? Does it?
54:41 David Pierce? No, it's awful. It is so, so bad, you guys. I can't, I can't even tell you how bad it is. Like, let me, I'll just give you a bunch of examples. Uh, I say to the thing, play my Discover Weekly playlist and it plays every single time a song called Can You Discover by a band Discovery. I say, play Beyonce's new album and it played like a lullaby version of Crazy in Love. And it's weird because it's not even like it's just searching and playing the first result because if you go to Spotify and search Discover Weekly. It shows you your Discovery Weekly playlist. So in theory, that shouldn't be that hard a problem. It's doing some weird thing that I can't figure out yet and almost always does it wrong.
55:23 David Pierce? So if I ask like a very basic question, like play Justin Timberlake, that works. It'll play a Justin Timberlake song, and I have done that many, many times. But anything more complicated, at least so far, it has fallen apart on me every single time.
55:39 Nilay Patel? See, this is why I don't understand about how it's working. If you're saying you can go to Spotify's website and type in crazy in love, and it shows you the first result is correct. Theoretically, that is all the large action model is doing on the backend. Right? It's looking at the web interface, it's identifying the search box, it's entering the string. It's saying, here's the first result and it's double clicking on it. By the way, this is not some radically new idea, right? Like, big businesses deploy robotic process automation to run their billing systems on Windows 98. Billion dollar companies exist to deploy this at the enterprise scale.
56:12 David Pierce? And Rabbit has more or less acknowledged that that is what it's doing, by the way. There was this weird thing, I don't know if you saw that there's somebody, it was called like Rabbit Scam on GitHub, sort of said they had found a bunch of code showing that all Rabbit was doing was just lifting
56:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
56:29 David Pierce? stuff off of webpages and running the same systems that everybody else runs in order to like, understand what's going on on a website. And they were like, this isn't as scary as you think it is like, yeah, that's, that's what we do. That's our public code. So like, they're acknowledging that this is what is going on. And I think-
56:44 Nilay Patel? But it's not working. Like-
56:46 David Pierce? Yeah.
56:46 Nilay Patel? So you are, again, if you're like some midsize hospital system and you hire UiPath to show up and do RPA, and it's like, we're doing the lullaby versions, you're like, fire them. It's like, get rid of them, right? UiPath is a billion dollar company because it can do robotic process automation reliably at scale. Like, why-
57:04 Alex Cranz? Rabbit costs $200.
57:05 Nilay Patel? Well, it costs $200, but even the thing, like, the basic thing. We entered a string of text into a search box and we played the first result. Like the industry, the robotic process automation industry knows how to do that. So why can't it do that? Like, it feels like it's doing something else.
57:21 Alex Cranz? Is it like inserting a little clippy in there? Is it trying to like be smart for you?
57:27 David Pierce? It might be. It's also possible that it's doing something different with Spotify because Spotify like has an actual sort of corpus of data that it lets other systems access. So I can't speak to Spotify in particular, but at least from the demos that I've seen, again, I haven't been able to get DoorDash to work once. But from Jesse's demo of DoorDash, that seemed very clearly to be the thing using the website. Because the way that he showed what was working was he kept refreshing doordash.com on his laptop. And it would show that something had been added to the cart on the website. That's not like a thing that happens if you use like a third party API to do all of this stuff. That is just a thing using the web app for you.
58:07 Nilay Patel? So this is the part that I'm just like most interested in because DoorDash is the slowest one. And they said it's the slowest one. And there comes a point at which all this like just horsepower through the interface with computer vision. It just hits the wall of like, what if you just had an API? Right? What if you could just, instead of trying to have a robot figure out what's happening on an interface made for humans? What if you just let the robot talk to the application directly using actual API commands? The example that I'll give people, one of my favorite companies that I wished had succeeded was Kavo, the universal remote company that I hyped up on the show over and over again. They were doing exactly this to build a universal one. You plug all of your devices into the Kavo. And the Kavo is doing computer vision to watch your Apple TV interface or whatever and click around on your behalf.
58:53 Nilay Patel? So you could just say the name of a show and the name of a service and it would just like bang around your TV and use it for you. And this shit was awesome when it worked. It was very slow and it was extraordinarily brittle when it broke.
59:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it never worked. Like, the win is very generous.
59:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it sometimes it worked, you know?
59:12 Alex Cranz? And it was cool. It was very cool in those moments. It worked, but most of the time it didn't.
59:16 Nilay Patel? Right. And then the thing that like really got you was it wouldn't even show you the clicking around. Like, it would put up the Kavo screen and you would hear it like booping in the background. You'd be like, can I just see if you're getting this right? I would love to check your work. And then you'd be like, that is not what I wanted to happen at all. Or it would just error out. But the idea that like you've got a bunch of devices plugged into a central HDMI switcher and you're like, watch the show and it knows that's the Apple TV. And you're like, I want to play PlayStation. And it switches the input and bangs around. Like, all of that was awesome.
59:43 Nilay Patel? But it failed because fundamentally, the approach is brittle. Right? It just, there are known ways for it to break when the computer cannot understand what it's seeing. It's $199. Like, can they overcome this problem? Or do they actually just need to build a bunch of APIs? And then you've got something that looks like, I think you have in your piece, that's just a mid-range Android smartphone with weird apps.
1:00:04 David Pierce? Yeah, the answer is ultimately both, right? And I think, I think Humane has said this about what it's working on. Rabbit has alluded to this too. Like, they eventually want to build big enough systems that others will actually integrate with. Because the reason to not rely on APIs is that you're a tiny startup and nobody cares about you and nobody will make the deals with you. So you do hacky computer vision stuff so that you don't have to get the deals. Because by and large, they can't really stop you from doing that. They can, they can get mad and they have some ways, but like, it's a more winnable game in that particular respect. But the way for them to do this, they all acknowledge, is to eventually have those more official partnerships that just give them access to the DoorDash API.
1:00:47 David Pierce? And then, like, this doesn't all have to be AI, right? Like, I actually think we like run into a trap when we assume that the only way to do AI things is for all of it to be AI. Like, some of it shouldn't be. We've solved a lot of problems, actually. Like, we're, we're pretty good at a lot of things that don't require pinging a large language models for order McDonald's. Like, that's like, ordering McDonald's on the internet is like a solved problem. We're very good at it now. And so I think we'll land there with a lot of stuff, but one nice thing you can do with these models is you can hack together a kind of solution to a lot of those business deals. Without needing those business deals. And I think that's what all of these companies are doing at first.
1:01:26 Nilay Patel? The question is what a DoorDash is gonna say. This is illegal scraping of our website. Like, there's another whole set of problems that you kind of walk into immediately.
1:01:33 David Pierce? I mean, the good news for DoorDash is DoorDash just wants you to order McDonald's, right? Like, I, and I think that's the, the assumption that they're making, right? Like Uber wants me in an Uber and is very happy anything that happens that gets me in an Uber. Same with DoorDash and me ordering McDonald's.
1:01:46 Nilay Patel? Does Spotify want to stream copyrighted music to an orange rectangle?
1:01:51 David Pierce? Yeah. I, yeah, I don't, I don't know.
1:01:53 Nilay Patel? They did, on their list of things that are coming is Apple Music. And it's like, is it? Is that one coming? Have you met them? Like, they don't like competitors. They're not, you know, even Apple Music, which is theoretically the, you know, horizontal play across, like, have you tried Apple Music on Android? You think your weird little robot is gonna be allowed to use Apple Music web that way? I don't know, we'll see. I'm very excited for you to review this thing. I think that, that central question of like, at $199 with no recurring fee, can you make this a business that needs to improve on some of the core AI features it is reliant on? Believe it or not, the thing you're saying, um, a bunch of these are solved problems, right? Okay, that's great.
1:02:37 Nilay Patel? The, the things that are sort of easiest to do are solved problems. Order some food, call a ride, play songs, all API stuff. That means you're relying on the AI to solve all of the edge cases. Go to Photoshop and draw a cropping square around a thing like, that is not a solved problem. You cannot API your way into doing that in Photoshop in the general case. You can do it maybe in some specialized ways. Okay, you're now, it's $199, no, no recurring revenue. Can you make an AI that can solve for the general case of using a computer? Is the question that this thing is asking, and I just like, don't know the answer.
1:03:13 Alex Cranz? I feel the answer is probably no, but David, I just need you to do one thing for me. Can you hold it up to the mic and like, click one of the buttons? I just need to know how clicky they are.
1:03:23 Nilay Patel? Chris is like, do some ASMR shit.
1:03:24 David Pierce? It's pretty quiet.
1:03:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Oh, it's so quiet.
1:03:26 Nilay Patel? That's nothing.
1:03:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:03:27 Nilay Patel? He's clicking right now. Pull over in your car, turn off the engine. Roll up the windows.
1:03:32 Alex Cranz? Click, click, click.
1:03:33 David Pierce? That's what it sounds like.
1:03:34 Nilay Patel? No, do it without the clicks, they're, they're pulled over now.
1:03:37 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
1:03:39 Nilay Patel? It's not so bad. The people in the electric cars are like, what engine?
1:03:45 David Pierce? No, but to me, the thing is like the the big open question for me with both the humane pin and this was like, what is like the one thing that this is actually for? And I keep hoping it's going to be music. And humane almost got there, except for all the ways it was awful. Uh, and this, like, I was excited because it's Spotify and Spotify is what I and hundreds of millions of other people use to listen to music. Just not there. But uh, so far, it's a pretty good like question and answer machine, which I'm happy about. Uh, Rabbit has a big integration with perplexity, the AI search engine. So for like relatively real time questions, like the the NFL draft is tomorrow. As we're recording this, and I was asking it a bunch of questions about like, who is likely to go where in the NFL draft?
1:04:28 David Pierce? And it had good up to date information about the NFL draft. Like, that's cool.
1:04:33 David Pierce? Uh, cue all the people saying, why can't I just do it on my smartphone? Like you super duper can. But what's weird to me about this so far, and again, I have a lot of testing and stuff left to do, is like this little thing, the gadget itself, feels right for this moment in AI. Like, it's pretty cheap. It's not that ambitious. It's sort of silly and fun. It's like, worst case scenario, it just like will look cool on my desk. Yeah, people pay a lot more for cool things on their desk, right?
1:05:01 David Pierce? But they're also at the same time talking about this massive world changing vision for where it will all go. And Jesse, to his credit, is constantly sort of tamping that down, saying we're just at the very beginning. We haven't solved most of these problems. He said something at the beginning of his speech last night that was like, I'm gonna try all these demos, uh, and if they don't work, I'll try them again. And if they still don't work, we'll fix it. And I was like, what a, what a perfect summation of like the time we're in for AI. And so I think all of that is right. And I I appreciate kind of the like realism of what Rabbit is doing as opposed to like humane, which is like, you know, sort of brought from the earth, fully formed. We have solved this.
1:05:44 David Pierce? But then they're still like wildly overstating what this thing can actually do in a way that I find very frustrating.
1:05:50 Nilay Patel? There's a bunch of comments on your hands on posts, like, why are you being nice to this in humane? And it's like, well, one, it's not actually a review yet. Important note, like, we're just holding the thing. And two, it's like, it's $200.
1:06:01 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:06:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:06:02 Nilay Patel? And that's just different. But I, I, I am very curious to see, as you go through this review process, how much it needs to lean on the computer vision piece. Because the more it has to do that, which is the AI of it all, the worse it's gonna be.
1:06:17 David Pierce? Yes.
1:06:18 Nilay Patel? I feel that very keenly. All right. Some more things we should talk about in this section. Apple announced a May 7 event for new iPads. Two things about this. One, it's just an infomercial. Just like tune in to watch our stream. No one's going anywhere.
1:06:30 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:06:30 Nilay Patel? And then they, they're calling it Let It Loose. And our friend Joanna Stern pointed this out. The S in loose looks like a G, so it's Let It Luge. Which is, if you want to think about what that means in the context of new iPads, I welcome you. I personally believe Apple is announcing a luge.
1:06:50 Nilay Patel? It's very weird.
1:06:51 David Pierce? It's a huge, like, boogie board sized iPad.
1:06:54 Nilay Patel? It's a cursive capital S, so it's like weird. And so in context, it looks like a lowercase g. Very good.
1:07:00 David Pierce? It's pretty awesome.
1:07:02 Nilay Patel? It feels like we're gonna get an OLED iPad, right? That's the rumor. It feels like they'll just chip bump everything else. I'm trying very hard not to buy an OLED iPad.
1:07:11 Alex Cranz? But you're gonna...
1:07:13 Nilay Patel? Why? Like, I don't use the one I have.
1:07:15 Alex Cranz? So that I'm not the only one. Like, I need, I need other people making bad personal decisions.
1:07:19 Nilay Patel? We're gonna do a group buy. We're gonna call Tim Cook and we're like, can you get a group rate on ill-conceived iPads? It, it just feels like this, that what they actually need to do is announce new software for the iPad, not new hardware.
1:07:31 David Pierce? There were a bunch of people talking about this that I really enjoyed. That was like, after this came out, everybody was like, relax, the real iPad event is WWDC in June. Like, this, this doesn't matter. And I think that's probably true. Like, the strangest thing about the iPad is the hardware has been really good for a really long time. I would, other than, please move the camera from the bad spot to the good spot. I have very few issues with the iPad's hardware and have not had issues for a long time. I have a million issues with what it's like to actually use the damn thing.
1:08:02 Alex Cranz? That's why I'm kind of curious about, one of the big rumors is that they're gonna do a new magic keyboard that's like, aluminum or something. It's more like a, just a laptop case.
1:08:13 David Pierce? Yeah, with a bigger trackpad like that would be cool.
1:08:15 Nilay Patel? David, I'm pointing out the 10th gen iPad move. They move the camera.
1:08:18 David Pierce? I know, but they haven't. They haven't on the other ones. Move it on all the other places.
1:08:21 Alex Cranz? They're gonna probably do it on the Pro in the air this time around.
1:08:25 Nilay Patel? At some point, they have to admit that the Pro is just a weird laptop.
1:08:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah, maybe this is the time.
1:08:30 Nilay Patel? Like I've been. I've been using my ancient now 11 inch iPad Pro is like a tablet like this is dumb. Like it's just laptop all the time. I want to use it as tablet. Boy, do I want to read stereo review in PDF form on my iPad as God intended.
1:08:46 Nilay Patel? But it's just like the thing. It's like yearns to be in its.
1:08:50 David Pierce? Yeah, you're also you. I've noticed you started sending a lot of Apple News plus links around, which makes me think you you are becoming more of an iPad user.
1:08:59 Nilay Patel? I'm just a mover now. I'm a dad. I live in the suburbs. Sold my truck. I haven't sold the truck yet. It's heartbreaking to think about selling my stupid truck. It's this is just me trying to not use Twitter and Wall Street Journal and Condon Asperger's publications are Apple News Plus. I got suckered in the deal. Great. Fine, right? But do I love it? Do I think Apple News? I just I'm not going to pass any judgment on Apple News Plus. I'm just gonna ask anybody who has the product. Go and look at the list of trending stories and be like, who do we think this audience is?
1:09:34 Nilay Patel? You just make that distinction all in your. I don't. I'm not going to pass any judgment, but I'm like. That they're not getting younger is what I would say. It doesn't appear that they're getting younger with time.
1:09:46 Nilay Patel? But anyway, I yeah, I'm trying to use the iPad as a consumption device and the iPad Pro in particular. It kind of yearns to be in a keyboard case, and I hope they just go for it. Like we have a weird mini laptop. It's fine, you know, but the the software has to change. So that's it. That's coming very soon. May 7th, a couple of weeks from now. The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses got a big update. They have multimodal AI now. They announced some new colors and it's in various three designs that they have. I feel like I'm like about to buy one of these.
1:10:13 David Pierce? You should.
1:10:13 Nilay Patel? Meta also announced that it's making headsets with other people and attempt to make sort of Quest OS, the open. VR headset, which Zuckerberg has talked about a lot. They're gonna make an Xbox VR headset. It's a limited edition Meta Quest. So you can see Zuckerberg is like, we're gonna be the Android of VR. Well, Apple's doing whatever it's doing over here.
1:10:33 Alex Cranz? Can we, we call out the fact that it is so funny to watch Microsoft go from being like, we're gonna create the VR head, like, the VR space. We're, we're gonna do it all mixed reality. We're gonna own this place to, we're gonna do a rebranded Meta Quest 3.
1:10:50 Nilay Patel? I mean, if you're Microsoft and you're out there being like, the future is Xbox game streaming, you might as well look and have it and run. The Quest is basically like an Android phone, right on your face.
1:11:00 David Pierce? Yeah, take the free ads. I mean, and the, the way they described it was so funny. It's like, it's a, it's a Quest 3 inspired by Xbox or something, which just makes me think like, somebody at Microsoft like sent over the hex codes for the Xbox green and we're like, do whatever you want. Leave us alone.
1:11:17 Alex Cranz? I hope it is like, just huge. I hope it is so chunky, like the original Xbox.
1:11:22 David Pierce? It's just a full on like master sheet helmet.
1:11:24 Alex Cranz? Xbox controller. Yeah, just over the top.
1:11:28 Nilay Patel? So the OS, the Quest OS is being rebranded, I guess, to Meta Horizon OS, which is just a lot of words.
1:11:36 David Pierce? Yeah, it's weird. There was like Horizon Worlds and then there was Horizon Workrooms. So that was kind of always gonna be their thing, but now they're trying to make it even bigger. I will say Horizon, great name for an operating system. Great job. The names are insane.
1:11:51 Nilay Patel? It's just a lot of words. So Horizon OS runs on the Quest hardware and Xbox is making it Xbox inspired. That's a lot. Good news, though. More companies that are known for their good names will be participating in this ecosystem, including Asus's Republic of Gamers. Very excited for the names to come from them. Lenovo. We'll make something that will be.
1:12:14 Alex Cranz? It'll have Legion in it somewhere.
1:12:15 Nilay Patel? A word salad. Yep.
1:12:17 David Pierce? Lenovo Legion Quest Flip 13.
1:12:20 Nilay Patel? Yep. And, and then all of these are going to run on Qualcomm chips. Qualcomm also well known for stretching the boundaries.
1:12:30 Nilay Patel? So that's interesting. We'll see how that goes. Right there, the players, they have the momentum. The Quest, it's Quest 3 itself got an update where the pass through videos of higher quality and looks better when you look at phones. There's momentum over there. I want to come back to actually the Ray-Ban glasses, which are a hit. Like they feel like a quiet hit. I know a lot of people who have them. Our friend Joanna Stern says she doesn't travel or go on field video shoots without them anymore.
1:12:56 David Pierce? Wow.
1:12:57 Alex Cranz? They're really good. I've got a pair. I, I should wear mine more. I'm legit thinking about going and getting prescription lenses put in it because I always have to put my contacts in and it's like, that friction's too much, but every time I wear them, I'm like, why don't I wear my contacts more often? These like are awesome.
1:13:12 Nilay Patel? They're cheap. They're 300 bucks. I've got a friend who in the pandemic, she just became one of those people who doesn't live anywhere. She's just like, literally last week, she's like, I'm working from about. And I was like, I hate you. You seem great. All of her photos are from Meta Quest.
1:13:24 David Pierce? Well, and the thing Meta got really right was it, it went the correct direction in terms of saying like, we're going to pick a very small number of things for this device to do. And it's going to do them pretty well. And then we're going to slowly add things that it can do. Like it, when it started, it was like, okay, it's a pretty good speaker system. If you like, want to listen to music or podcasts or whatever, that's mostly what I use it for. It's become like, when I'm out on a walk or whatever, I wear it instead. I wear the glasses instead of headphones now, which is awesome. Pretty good camera. People really like taking photos and videos that way. And now they're adding on. They're like, okay, now we can do, they had the, you could like ask Meta AI questions, but now they're adding the multimodal stuff. And so they're like,
1:14:08 David Pierce? they're sequencing this stuff really smartly instead of like promising the world from the very beginning and then not meeting people's expectations, which I think is really the key. These are better than people expected them to be, which is so, so, so rare in this moment with hardware.
1:14:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And again, the first thing they just had to be was some nice looking Ray-Bans.
1:14:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:14:27 Nilay Patel? It's like, all right, get a pair of Wayfarers, you have these other two designs. Like, people just like those designs. Whether or not the battery lasts, the camera works, it's like, oh, no, just pay a Wayfarers. Like, maybe it'll be cool. And now they're setting all this cool stuff.
1:14:36 David Pierce? It was like that old Mitch Hedberg joke, right? That like when an escalator, an escalator doesn't break, it just becomes stairs. Like, that's, that's these glasses, right? Like, the worst case scenario is you just have a nice pair of sunglasses.
1:14:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And honestly, three hundred bucks for a pair of Ray-Bans is like a little bit of a premium, but it's not crazy.
1:14:51 David Pierce? No.
1:14:51 Nilay Patel? And now the multimodal AI, you can do the thing. What am I looking at? It tells you, right? That's the big trick. That's the, it's emerging as the party trick of these AI devices.
1:15:00 David Pierce? And it's as messy as anything else. Like, Vsong did a bunch of testing with it, and it was like hilariously wrong about cars and all this stuff. And it's always like, all these systems, it's very confident and just lies to your face.
1:15:11 Nilay Patel? I, actually, I'm, I'm starting to be of the mind that we need to push back strongly against calling any of this AI. We just need to call them language models, uh, because they just make up words. There's no intelligence, artificial or otherwise, happening here. Uh, it's gonna be a hard fight. I don't think we're gonna, I'm not gonna win that fight. There's a lot of fights I've won. I'm not gonna win that fight.
1:15:30 David Pierce? Support you.
1:15:31 Nilay Patel? But the conflation of can you talk with are you smart is in a real weird moment on the internet right now. Turns out, I talk a lot. I'm not trying to burn anybody. Just putting that out there. Fascinating to me, though, uh, put, just add all this up, right? You got Meta doing this sort of open stuff with Lenovo and all these other companies. You've got the glasses, which are sort of a sneaky hit that people like, next to, okay, uh, analyst reports, Vision Pro demand is suffering. Right? And it's like, did Apple just get outgunned by a pair of Ray-Bans?
1:16:05 David Pierce? Yes.
1:16:06 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:16:07 Nilay Patel? That's crazy.
1:16:08 David Pierce? It's nuts.
1:16:08 Alex Cranz? It's not crazy, though. It was a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bet against a three-hundred-dollar bet.
1:16:13 David Pierce? I don't even think it's that. I think Apple just miscalculated. Like, I, the, the longer I use these devices, the more I can't believe Apple didn't make the smart glasses. Like, i- if, in the thing that Apple has traditionally done, which is like build a thing and then build the more complicated thing and then build the more complicated, like, Apple is actually very good at laddering that stuff up over time. And in this case, just way overshot. It was like it was like building four generations too soon and trying to convince people to buy it. And what if if they had just built like the iPod version of it, which is just like a nice thing for listening to music and talking to an assistant, people would have gone nuts for it. And it is like it continues to blow my mind that Apple just, I think, picked wrong.
1:16:57 Alex Cranz? They could still do it. We could still get the Apple Vision Air.
1:17:01 David Pierce? Oh, I'm sure we will. I'm sure that's where it's headed. But like, I the what the humane folks told me is they're like, Okay, well, when we built this, we decided to build the hardest thing first, based on the idea that then it's much easier to sort of ratchet our ambition down and sell cheaper, simpler versions of the thing. But it turns out, if you blow the expensive one, you don't get the chance to do the next things. And I think Apple has kind of dug itself a hole here by so aggressively overshooting. I also like, all these supply chain numbers should be taken with like a giant heap of salt all the time. But I will say, anecdotally, nobody talks about the Vision Pro anymore.
1:17:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:17:35 David Pierce? It has totally faded.
1:17:36 Nilay Patel? I spent a lot of time looking in the subreddit. And it is, a lot of people are like, what are we using this thing for? You know, and there's like, one app comes out and it's a hit and people really like it. But it's a little little dire in there. I'm just gonna say I was right in there. Yep, just putting that out there. It took a lot of heat for that one.
1:17:53 David Pierce? It's better out here.
1:17:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's better. Right. The question is, like, is it worth putting it on? And there isn't anything that makes it worth putting on. There's a few things that sometimes, but even Mark Gurman in his newsletter, where he was talking about some of these real things, like, I'm wearing this thing less and less. Like, it's lonely. Like, he's like, I don't want to watch basketball. And it's weird. It's just like a weird moment in hardware.
1:18:13 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:18:14 Nilay Patel? Where the big expensive stuff didn't go and the the sort of cheap stuff that's making small promises is gaining a new kind of momentum. I think I'm gonna buy them. I don't know why. I have too many glasses. I lose them. I have a rule to not buy glasses that are more than 50 bucks, not buy sunglasses that are more than 50 bucks, because they're gone.
1:18:29 David Pierce? That's good.
1:18:29 Nilay Patel? I might as well just flush the 50 dollars down the toilet. You know what I mean? But there's probably it's like, what if?
1:18:35 David Pierce? The goodness is, these these ones are very heavy. So it will be hard to lose them. They did like.
1:18:41 Alex Cranz? And the charging case is really nice. So you're gonna be like, oh, I can't lose my charging case, because it's so nice. And then you'll never lose your glasses.
1:18:50 Nilay Patel? Alex, you've never under us.
1:18:51 Alex Cranz? I'm just filled with optimism today. Just all optimism.
1:18:56 Nilay Patel? All right, we're gonna take a break. I'm gonna look on the Meta website and see and see if I can convince myself to those 300 dollars. We're gonna come back. We gotta talk about Tesla, then we got a lightning round, then we're gonna get out of here. We'll be right back.
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1:20:35 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. We had to talk about Tesla. Tesla had earnings. Andy Hawkins headline for the preview of earnings was Tesla is in its flop era, which is a great headline. Just to recap, Tesla has laid off more than 10% of its workforce, like 14,000 people. A bunch of executives are leaving, including the guy who was in charge of the powertrain and energy division. And then the head of policy, who's the guy who gets autonomy approved, also gone. A lot going on with Tesla, right? There's a rumor that they're gonna cancel the cheap EV and then they kinda said they weren't gonna cancel it. But it also sounds like what they're really going to do is make the Model Y cheaper. Uh, they've recalled all thirty eight hundred Cybertrucks, three thousand eight hundred seventy Cybertrucks. Uh, but they talked.
1:21:17 Nilay Patel? Elon said Optimus would be a fully sentient robot that would, uh, quote, expand the econo- the world economy infinitely.
1:21:25 David Pierce? Yeah, sick.
1:21:26 Nilay Patel? They'll be selling that at the end of next year.
1:21:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:21:28 Alex Cranz? Sure.
1:21:28 Nilay Patel? So a classic Elon bump there.
1:21:30 David Pierce? I think he even said in that announcement, in that, like, in that sentence, I think he said, but I'm just guessing. It's like, all right, cool. Yeah. Great investor call.
1:21:39 Nilay Patel? There's a new Model Three Performance. Great. But they don't have his new cars. There's not really a plan to have new cars. They're going to announce some robot taxi plan on August eighth. And then there's this thing that they've been talking about, which he brought up again on the earnings call today, which I just wanted to talk about for five seconds because it is bonkers to me. He was talking about how many H one hundreds Tesla has. He went on this very funny aside about how he doesn't like calling them GPUs because they don't have any graphics, but whatever. It's, you can hear the investors being like, what? Um, and then he got to, we have all these H one hundreds and we are doing inference, AI inference more efficiently because we had to learn how to do it in the car, which is constrained. Great. That makes sense. It's a good argument. Why not? You can measure it. Well, that makes sense. And then he's like, we've got this like AWS play, which they've hinted at before, but
1:22:22 Nilay Patel? he was like, what we're going to do is run it on all the Teslas that are just sitting around. So, quote, "If you can imagine in the future, perhaps there's a fleet of one hundred million Teslas and on average they've gotten like maybe a kilowatt of inference compute. That's a hundred gigawatts of inference compute distributed all around the world. It's pretty hard to put together a hundred gigawatts of AI compute." So, and perhaps maybe instead of using the car 10 hours a week, we use it 50 hours a week while it's sitting there. That leaves over a hundred hours a week where the car inference computer can be doing something else and it seems like it would be a waste to not use it. My man is describing seti at home for Tesla.
1:22:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah. What do those terms of service look like?
1:23:00 Nilay Patel? Right. It's just like you, do you want to run compute models on your car while it's just like sitting in the driveway? Your car, which, uh, by the way, famously runs on electricity. Like, where's that electricity? Where's that power bill coming from? Are you going to get it cheaper? She buy a car and now Elon can use it to do whatever inference to run whatever robot taxi fleet that he thinks he's going to need to run it. Also, I don't know if you know about AWS. They like knowing where the computers are.
1:23:25 David Pierce? And typically, those computers are not driving somewhere between 20 and 100 miles an hour while they're being used.
1:23:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I've interviewed the CEO of AWS. I would say a core assumption of that conversation was that he knew where the servers were.
1:23:39 Nilay Patel? And they were not ever at risk of crashing into other servers.
1:23:42 David Pierce? This feels like such a classic Elon Musk thing, because even as you were reading that, it's like, okay, this sort of makes sense. Like, big fleet, lots of compute sitting around. What if we use the compute? And then it's like you raise your hand and you go like, how is any of that gonna work? And it's like, ah, don't worry about that.
1:24:01 Alex Cranz? Doing it at the same time that like Chevy is getting a lot of flack because they've been using their computers to spy on people and report it to their insurance companies. Like, maybe not the time to be like, yeah, you've got a computer in there and I want to use it.
1:24:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like, it's mine now.
1:24:16 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:24:17 Nilay Patel? I just think this is the one where it's like, what Elon is searching for is arguments that Tesla will have massive margins. Software company style margins instead of car company margins. And the thing that's hammering Tesla right now is they have absolutely car company margins again, because they dropped the price so much. And they don't have any new cars. So the competition is here. And you can see the sales fell 55%. Like, they're just not doing it anymore. And so he's concocting these arguments where a sentient optimist robot will expand the world economy by infinity. That's a pretty good margin.
1:24:49 David Pierce? It's good.
1:24:50 Nilay Patel? It's, I mean, you know, more power to you if you pull that off. And then he's like, and I'm gonna build this like distributed data center. So now I'm running AWS instead of having to build a data center in Texas or wherever you might need to build it. And it's like, this is, the, the truth is outing here, right? Like, it is very hard to get from here to I'm running a distributed AI supercomputer in every Tesla in the world.
1:25:15 Nilay Patel? It's very hard.
1:25:16 Alex Cranz? It kind of feels a little like a Peloton moment for him. You know, where Peloton, everybody, everybody got a Peloton because they wanted one. And it feels like maybe everyone who wanted the Tesla got one.
1:25:28 Nilay Patel? Well, let me just ask you this question about this distributed difference computer. What happens at rush hour?
1:25:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:25:33 Nilay Patel? Right. The total capacity of the computer is just like plummets like hour by hour. Like it's always five o'clock somewhere, like every hour, there's just like huge dip in capacity. Like starts and it comes, starts coming back online at 7:00 PM. Like literally the sun sets on Tesla's compute capacity across the United States every single day. Like it's very hard to pull this through. I think, I think Tesla is in a fascinating moment. I am not sure it five years from now, it looks anything like this company.
1:26:01 David Pierce? No, yeah, it seems hard to imagine. I mean, I think this company has already gone through so many weirder iterations than anybody would have expected. And continues to sort of chug along like Tesla feels very much like a cockroach at this point. That sort of nothing could happen to Tesla that would surprise me. And also it will be the last company that exists on planet earth.
1:26:23 Alex Cranz? Oh, I disagree.
1:26:24 David Pierce? But.
1:26:24 Alex Cranz? I like, it feels like it's going to crap.
1:26:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah, even like a bunch of Tesla fans were like, I don't know about this anymore.
1:26:33 David Pierce? Well, that's, I mean, that's one of the big questions to me. I was talking about this with Andy Hawkins yesterday, like this question of kind of the Elon Musk effect, that the people who are predisposed to want Teslas for a lot of the reasons that Tesla promotes them, being good for the world and all that, are also people who are likely to not be psyched about Elon Musk's shenanigans, particularly as he runs X. And so trying to figure out how to quantify how much of this is about the, the challenges in the EV market? How much this is about plug in hybrids, which I thought was a really interesting thing that Musk said during the earnings call? He blamed a lot of the struggle on the rise in plug in hybrids.
1:27:15 David Pierce? And how much of this is just people voting with their dollars and voting against Elon Musk? It's really hard to know, and I think it's going to be super obvious in retrospect. And I'm very curious how it's going to shake out.
1:27:26 Alex Cranz? There's also the fact that if you're just going to buy a car and you're going out in the world and you're like, I'm going to buy a car and you don't buy a car based on id. Then you go and you look and you say, okay, Teslas have really bad reliability. They're really hard to repair. They're really hard to just get an appointment and oftentimes that appointment's horrible. The build quality is crap to the point that like they keep having to do recalls on the Cybertruck. Like, those are all just signs of a badly run company. And I think, I think this company had a lot of advantage because it was first mover.
1:27:58 David Pierce? Mm hmm.
1:27:58 Alex Cranz? And Elon Musk is an incredible salesman. But now like the bloom is off that rose. Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, ripped that right off. And now it's like, okay, we see that this guy is just a really good salesman and he pulls it all out of his butt. And he is not some genius. And actually, he's not running a very good company because he's running 12 at once. And no one can do that, even Elon Musk.
1:28:19 Nilay Patel? Alex is Alex Cranz, the verge with a K.
1:28:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:28:22 Nilay Patel? Just email that.
1:28:24 Alex Cranz? Hit me up.
1:28:24 Nilay Patel? I'm doing you a favor.
1:28:25 Alex Cranz? I'm here to debate you.
1:28:26 Nilay Patel? Debate Alex with a K. Please.
1:28:29 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be great.
1:28:30 Nilay Patel? Honey potting Tesla trolls. Uh, I don't think you're wrong. I just think, I think the fundamentals of the auto business, he has to not be a car company. And it, the thing that is happening is it's getting sucked into being a car company.
1:28:43 David Pierce? Because it is one.
1:28:43 Nilay Patel? And because it.
1:28:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because it is one.
1:28:45 Nilay Patel? They make cars. And the blaming the hybrid thing is super funny to me. Like, yes, I own a hybrid, but like, you're basically telling your customers that they're wrong. Right? And how do you get across? How do you get past the market making a decision and regulate the market? Joe Biden, will you make hybrids illegal is like kind of the only answer to that. Or you can yell at everyone that they're wrong. And like yelling at the market that it's wrong is like, not great.
1:29:06 Alex Cranz? That always famously works for everyone who does it.
1:29:09 Nilay Patel? Uh, this is famously why Betamax beat VHS.
1:29:13 Alex Cranz? Everyone knows it.
1:29:13 Nilay Patel? I don't think hybrid, I think hybrids, everyone I know who has hybrid knows it's like some short term solution. The infrastructure not being there. And now, like, everyone prefers to drive around on the battery.
1:29:22 David Pierce? My dad just recently bought a Prius after spending months looking for an EV. Because he just like, they just couldn't find one that made sense and decided that in their lives at this point, like, the next car should be an electric car. The car right now should not be. And I think a lot of people are making that decision.
1:29:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Also, new Prius, it doesn't look like an angry robot anymore.
1:29:44 David Pierce? No, it's kind of great.
1:29:46 Nilay Patel? It kind of looks.
1:29:47 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:29:48 Nilay Patel? We'll see. All right. Lightning round. What you got, David?
1:29:51 David Pierce? So while we're talking about Apple TV Plus, soon to be augmented by the purchase of TikTok. There was a, there was a report this week that Apple has been negotiating with FIFA, which is the, the governing body of soccer around the world, to do a new global tournament exclusively on Apple TV Plus. I find this fascinating for a bunch of reasons. One, Apple is like increasingly deep into the sports world. They have this thing with Major League Soccer that's going very well, it seems, in part because, you know, Lionel Messi decided to play for the MLS. But the numbers that have been thrown around are upwards of a billion dollars from Apple
1:30:33 David Pierce? to be the one to stream this tournament, which is like, we've spent a lot of time talking about Apple TV Plus as kind of a, somewhere between sort of a lark and a side project, that it was never going to be really material to Apple. It was just kind of a thing it did on the side in order to sell more subscriptions to iCloud, right? Like, that was always the play. This seems to me to be the sort of thing that you only do if you're actually serious about turning this into a real thing. And Apple is just further and further and further into sports in a way that I continue to find surprising and sort of fascinating. And they want to invent a completely new thing with some of the biggest soccer clubs in the world, which would be huge
1:31:16 David Pierce? and is immediately the kind of thing that would draw potentially millions of new people to Apple TV Plus. But this is like, there, there's no indication, I think it was a New York Times story that first reported this, that this is like a done deal, but they want to do it next summer, which means like, this is a big thing that could happen very quickly and like, I, I don't know, Apple TV Plus just continues to be a bigger thing than I think I've given it credit for.
1:31:40 Alex Cranz? I think it kind of makes sense, though, right now for Apple to do it, because Hollywood is in a state of flux, right? Like, like streaming is completely changing the game there. Everybody's trying to figure out where the revenue streams are. And the tech companies are kind of leading the forefront. The tech companies are running Hollywood in a way they haven't previously. And Apple is doing it really, really well. It's a smaller play than everybody else, but it's, it's doing it intelligently. And it's like, yeah, this, this makes sense for them to go in and just like, Take a couple of streaming services out.
1:32:14 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:32:14 Alex Cranz? Just body a few with money and and then buy snap up the the dregs of that later. Right? Like make a deal with Skydance or whatever.
1:32:22 David Pierce? But if that's the play, Apple could just walk into the offices of any streaming service it wanted to and just write a check for its valuation and then.
1:32:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but they don't want to do that. They want to buy like they want. They want cheap licenses and stuff like that. That's what runs these services.
1:32:37 David Pierce? But this is what I'm saying. A billion dollars to create a new soccer tournament is not that thing. Like the MLS thing I understood. That's a relatively small, relatively safe bet. And they got to essentially take over that whole project. This is a mod. This is like negotiating for NFL rights, which Apple like famously has not won.
1:32:55 Nilay Patel? They came close for Sunday Ticket.
1:32:56 David Pierce? Yeah, but it wanted what has been reported is that it wanted like complete control over this thing. And you're not getting that from the NFL and you're not getting it from FIFA. And they're still willing to throw billions of dollars at it. It's fascinating.
1:33:05 Alex Cranz? But this would drive subscriptions.
1:33:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, for sure.
1:33:08 David Pierce? It's sticky. Yeah.
1:33:09 Nilay Patel? Eddie Hughes, smart. He's also a huge sports fan.
1:33:11 David Pierce? Yeah, he is.
1:33:12 Nilay Patel? And he knows sports are the stickiest thing. We'll see. I'm I think Apple has to get good at broadcasting sports.
1:33:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:33:20 Nilay Patel? They're not great at it right now. So the more they get into it, the more they have to come. Does that like, does Tim Cook want to sit in Congress and talk about content moderation? I don't know. Does Tim Cook want to sit in front of a bunch of soccer fans and talk about penalties? Like, I don't know about that either.
1:33:34 Alex Cranz? He sits Eddie Hughes for that.
1:33:35 David Pierce? But does Tim Cook want to go like sit in a box at the World Cup? Like, yeah, absolutely.
1:33:39 Nilay Patel? That's true. All right. Cranz, what you got?
1:33:41 Alex Cranz? Uh, Qualcomm. They're back, baby. We'll see. We say that every once in a while. Just immediately undercut. Just immediate. Yeah. So Qualcomm has announced they they had previously announced some new processors and these are their kind of responses to the x86 processors from Intel and AMD. This is meant to go in Windows machines, meant to compete with Apple. They're saying they're as fast as the M3 and it's going to blow it out of the water. Uh, Joanna Neilis, our new laptop reviewer, went and checked some of them out in some very, very, very, very controlled demos. And she was like, there could be something there. She was seeing it was slower than the M3 in some cases, faster in others.
1:34:25 David Pierce? I mean, if it's even in the ballpark of the M3, that's a huge deal.
1:34:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's a huge deal, right? And I think there's, there's some really interesting stuff, particularly around architecture. They're not doing the big little core deal that everybody else does where they're like, these are performance cores. And these are efficiency cores. They're like, yeah, these are all performance cores because they're just that efficient.
1:34:43 David Pierce? Oh, God.
1:34:44 Alex Cranz? Um, that was me doing a Qualcomm impression. Sorry. So it's the Snapdragon X Elite was the ones previously announced, and now we have the Snapdragon X Plus.
1:34:56 David Pierce? Oh, good.
1:34:57 Alex Cranz? Which is slower, because it's not elite.
1:35:00 David Pierce? They're gonna throw a premium in there. No one's gonna know what's going on.
1:35:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah, nobody will know.
1:35:04 David Pierce? I appreciate that when you, when you try to match Apple's performance, you also try to match Apple's insane name scheme. This is good.
1:35:11 Alex Cranz? And it's, it's all bad. They're all, all the names are bad. But, uh, we don't know when, these are probably gonna come this year. We'll probably start seeing them in some Windows devices this year. And, uh, I'm really, really curious to see it because like if ARM and Windows can work for once, that would be huge.
1:35:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:35:27 Alex Cranz? But they famously kind of like screwed it up the last time.
1:35:30 David Pierce? And the time before that, and the time before that.
1:35:32 Alex Cranz? And the time before that, yeah. That's why I'm immediately undercut. Qualcomm's like back at it again at the Krispy Kreme.
1:35:39 David Pierce? The Microsoft event is May 20th or 21st or something, and they're gonna announce new surfaces that we think by all indications are going to run these things. So we're gonna, we're gonna see this sooner rather than later, but Tom's been reporting about how excited Microsoft is. Qualcomm seems very excited. This could be something.
1:35:56 Alex Cranz? Well, we've got Computex come in. That's May 31st.
1:35:59 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
1:36:00 Alex Cranz? My birthday. Hey.
1:36:01 David Pierce? Oh, it's gonna be like laptop explosion here. That's gonna be great.
1:36:04 Alex Cranz? So, so we're gonna get a lot of laptops soon, and I suspect a lot of them are gonna have these, these new processors in them. Will these processors be good?
1:36:12 David Pierce? It's a big move away from Intel. There's a lot of laptops with these weird Snapdragon chips in them. We'll see.
1:36:16 Alex Cranz? Yeah, well, we'll also have to see, because, uh, historically, the laptop makers don't like to ship the, the stuff besides Intel be to, to reviewers to check out. Because they want you to check out the thing that people actually buy, and that's usually the Intel products.
1:36:30 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:36:30 Alex Cranz? So it's, it's gonna be a fun one.
1:36:32 David Pierce? All right. Mine is very simple. Uh, so now it says a new app.
1:36:36 Nilay Patel? Looks very good. On mobile, they've sort of gotten rid of all the tabs and that's just all just widgets. It's cool. They decided it's gonna be faster. It's coming out May 7th. We'll see if the mobile app is faster. This is not the thing I actually want to talk about. They are getting rid of their desktop apps, which they've had forever on Mac and Windows. And they're going all to web apps and you can now, because it's web app, you can control your Sonos from anywhere, which is interesting. I'm just pointing out that the move to distribute applications on desktop computers to the web instead of in native binaries is like full speed ahead. Like it's over. Like, you know, Dylan Field, CEO of Figma was like, why would you distribute an app on a desktop computer any other way except the web? And like, yep, there's Electron and some other stuff where you package it up and it like looks native and da, da, da, da.
1:37:19 Nilay Patel? But I saw this and I was like, oh, this is just like, this is a huge shift in computers that is like reaching a point where it's, it's like no one even talks about it. Like it just assumed that if you're gonna make a new app for desktop computers, what you are actually shipping is a web app.
1:37:34 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:37:35 Nilay Patel? And I, the thing I'd point to is the Vision Pro, the high end of computers, the cutting edge of what a computer can be mounted directly to your face. All of the most interesting apps on the Vision Pro, the Netflix app, the YouTube app, whatever, are just custom web browsers.
1:37:50 David Pierce? Yeah, we really called that, by the way. I feel like we, we deserve credit for saying over and over that the thing that the only thing that might save the Vision Pro is, is web apps.
1:37:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:37:59 David Pierce? Uh, that has been absolutely correct.
1:38:01 Nilay Patel? Uh, anyway, I'm excited for the new Sonos thing because the old app is indeed slow.
1:38:04 David Pierce? Wasn't the old app supposed to fix the fact that the app before that was slow and bad?
1:38:10 Nilay Patel? No, so they, uh, this is like a long story. We had Patrick Spence on the show, I think, to explain himself to us when they did it.
1:38:15 David Pierce? I know.
1:38:15 Nilay Patel? And they had the old platform, which they now call S1.
1:38:18 David Pierce? Right.
1:38:19 Nilay Patel? Which was like ancient and they re-architected everything for the future and to support Atmos and all this other stuff they wanted to do. Um, uh, and that's called S2. So that was just an architecture update. It was not a, we need to make everything faster update.
1:38:31 David Pierce? So they kept their slow app, but made it work on the new architecture.
1:38:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's a lot of arguments about like what the best way to run Sonos is now. Like, do you want to run Sonos net? Which is like a custom 2.4 gigahertz network. You just want to run everything on wifi, which Sonos says you should do. Um, good times in these, in these subreddits.
1:38:47 David Pierce? I just use Spotify Connect and it works fine.
1:38:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:38:52 David Pierce? I wish I had a more complicated, interesting idea than that.
1:38:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:38:56 David Pierce? I never, ever touched the Sonos app and I'm very happy.
1:38:58 Alex Cranz? I've used AirPlay for years now. It's great.
1:39:00 Nilay Patel? It works just fine. And you can group things in AirPlay. You can group unlike speakers in AirPlay, which is very interesting. But I don't know, I still got a soft spot for it. All right, that's it. We are way over. We've touched on everything from web apps to the future of free speech in America.
1:39:15 David Pierce? Busy week.
1:39:15 Nilay Patel? To whatever's going on with Tesla. It's a lot. It was a big, it was a busy week. And we got more of them coming because we're, we're head first into developer conference season now.
1:39:23 David Pierce? Yep.
1:39:25 Nilay Patel? All right. I'm going to start a GoFundMe for this OLED iPad. You can hit me up. That's not true.
1:39:31 David Pierce? Tell Alex all your favorite things about your Tesla, if you have one. She'd love to hear them.
1:39:35 Nilay Patel? Oh, we need to say this. We utterly forgot to say this because we're so bad at this. We won Webby Awards. Thank you so much for all the people who voted for us and the people's choice of Vergecast. And you have the judges who gave the same award to the Decoder Podcast. We really do appreciate it. It's very cool that we have been doing the show for as long as we've do it, doing it, and people still voting for us for these awards. I truly appreciate it. Sponsor the lighting, Randy, the generous. All right, it's time.
1:40:04 Nilay Patel? All right, that's it. That's Vergecast.
1:40:09 David Pierce? And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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1:41:00 Speaker 09 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every 5 seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple Conducted Study of Heart Rate Accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.
Previous Congress takes on TikTok, privacy, and AI Next Phones are the ultimate AI gadget Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
